What value do we accord disabled lives? The question was forced, not for the first time, early on in the pandemic. As Lennard Davis put it, “A wartime gut reaction as well as a combination of health ethics templates and cost-benefit analyses assessing whose life is worth saving and whose is less so” created a “eugenics sinkhole” in which disabled people, in particular, were likely to get trapped, their lives defined as deficient, as less-than.1
The field of disability studies suggests a different conception of disabled experience. Here the experience of disability is viewed as intrinsic to the human condition, no more a “deficit” than is mortality, even though disability is more unevenly distributed. Three recent essays, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s “How We Got to CRISPR: The Dilemma of Being Human,” Emily Violet Maddox’s “Reading Walter Benjamin with a Disability Lens: The Storyteller and The Mummerelehn,” and Sari Altschuler’s “Touching...
